Today was a Yard Day, meaning that I was out raking leaves, mowing the lawn underneath them, and doing other stuff.

Normally I would rake the leaves to along the street; but I read in the local paper that the town will not break out the leaf-sweeper for another two weeks to due the cost of fuel. That means I have to bag the leaves if I want to be rid of them; there are now five bags on the side of the road.

Yesterday I got some blood work done for my doctor. That caps a hearing test (my hearing’s okay) and a flu shot on Wednesday.

Then I drove to Fry’s to buy a video cable to connect my backup computer to one of the television’s HDMI ports. The result is a much clearer picture than the VGA port could provide. I also bought my first gamepad; I never used a gamepad before, and I am still getting used to it. No matter how comfortable the gamepad feels in my hands, handling it is not like working a keyboard and mouse or even a trackball.

Friday was Ball State’s fall break (which is only one day for some reason), and I used the relative absence of students to remove the iMac G5s in the Reference area and replace them with new iMac Alums. There were eight of them, and it took all day to prep them because I had to install four different programs that cannot be put on a hard-disk image and to set up the five Reference printers.

I also installed a new printer in the Science Library with minimal difficulty. While I was there the Science Librarian told me that guest computer accounts were available from the Science Library counter. Then why can’t my sister the teacher get them? It turns out that my sister can visit the Science Library only on the weekends, when the Science Librarian is not there and when the student at the counter defers to the circulation counter at the main library. And if they say no, then that is it.

This finished my Mac reimaging project for this fall. Next, I look into upgrading the print job release stations, probably before the aging Gateway Profiles used as such get replaced.

I have been working with Gateway computers, both at work and at home (I owned a Gateway once), since the late 1990’s. I liked dealing with Gateway technical support, and I thought that the Gateway ads were cute. But Gateway really sank after the dot.com crash; it never became a favorite among techies (who can build their computers from scratch); and its foray into consumer electronics, while a moderate success, failed when it pulled out in fear. In the end Gateway sold itself to Acer (the crappy-computer and stinky-rose-ad-in-BYTE folks), giving up its institutional computer unit to Micron. That is pretty much the death of Gateway; I will miss it. Nobody at work will, though: After months of delay with an order of workstations from Gateway/Micron, my unit switched to Dell.